Your First Time--Using a Computer, That Is!

We have such a range of backgrounds and experiences on this board, I was thinking this would be an interesting question for you all:

What and when was your first experience using a computer?

Mine was in the 4th grade when a well-to-do classmate brought in his Commodore 64 so we could play around with it when we had inside recess for a few days. I remember our teacher had us all practice typing our names a few times. That took quite awhile!

I remember her saying that she predicted we would be using computers a lot more in our future. I remember being among the majority of the students who laughed at her remark. We played a lot of the game Gorf during those handful of days.

Thank you in advance for your responses about your first time!

RICHARD

 

Mine would of been around 4-5th, so around 1993 or so, and the Apple IIe. I remember playing the oregon tail on a green monitor.

A few years later my parents bought a home computer from Sears for like $3,000. A bitchin Packard Bell that was top of the line back then, now the shitiest smartphone you can find has more power/storage than that computer had.

 

Trash 80 back in the 1980s, although my father got me a hand held calculator back in the early 70s; being a Texas Instruments shareholder I think he got a good deal.

 

Senior in high school 70/71. We had a keyboard with a cradle for the phone handset that communicated with the cloud.

 

Very late 70s or early 80s Texas instruments TI something I remember typing the program in so we could play a game and then trying to find out typos when it would not work.

Then my brother bought an Apple II or IIe we were amazed by that.

 

I totally forgot that's how you would connect to the "internet" back in the day. My first experience with the internet with a 14.4k and you would only have to wait like 10-15 minutes for a picture to load. I remember one year I saved up all my money from odd jobs to purchase a 56k modem. That thing was like $125 (which was a shit ton of money to a middle school kid) and I was so proud to have it, made the internet sooooo much faster.

 

Sometime in the early 80s. TI 99. And it sold for $99. No monitor, no disc drive. Needed an external TV and for storage, you used your cassette player. Next up was a Apple 2 or 2E, I forget which.

 

sometime around 1965 there was an ad on the back page of a comic book for this....


so I saved up and bought one....it was sort a modern abacus

wish I had continued my interest in computers and how they worked.....#GROUNDFLOOR

 

First time on any kind of computer was in high school in 1979 with a HP or IBM using punch cards. That class was horrible. The teacher was a real dick and when I got out of the Navy and went to college he was teaching where I went, University of Wisconsin, and I had a class that he taught. That was 1987 and the computers were basically glorified typewriters/calculators.

 

I like the "Fun at Parties" part of the ad!

RICHARD

 

I had lots of fun playing OT with my friends!
That was our only "free time" option in freshman "computer literacy" class if we finished our assigned Basic program for the day!

RICHARD

 

As a freshman at the University of Minnesota during the fall of 1980, I was enrolled in a calculus class that incorporated the use of a Fortran-based computer programmed with punch cards.

That was my first experience with both calculus and computers.

I didn't survive the class.

 

Count me as another old enough to remember punch cards. Hated those things.

 

1949, University Of Pennsylvania. It was the size of a 3 story building. Hard drive was the size of a boxcar. They stored the formula for the atomic bomb in it. For a fee, a quarter if I remember, it would do your calculus homework for you. After hours, we would get it to draw pictures of girls in their bras.

 

Me, too. In the mid '80s, I made an attempt to back to college for a BS degree (already had an AS degree). One of the computer science classes used punch cards. I saw on student taking his large stack of cards to the card reader to run his program. He dropped the stack on the floor trying to load the reader. The guy was ready to sit on the floor and cry.

 

College, undergrad, I will not admit the year. This was when the "Glass Teletype", what we called it at the time, was the new high tech and replaced the punch cards and teletype printer.

 

When I was in college in the late 1970's, I used punchcards on an IBM 360 mainframe.

I built my first computer in 1980. It was an Z-80 based H-89 from Heathkit, on the USS Horne (CG-30).

It had 48K of RAM, and I spent $100 to upgrade it to 64K. It had 5 1/4" floppy disks and ran the CP/M Operating system.

The first program that I (tried) to write was a slot machine simulation, but the CPU clock speed and screen refresh rate were so slow, that it never ran satisfactorily.

 

I think it was in third grade (so maybe around 1987?). My school had a lab of the Apple monochrome computers (which at the time was green text on a black screen) and started us on typing very early.

 

At university in 1977, I typed my first program on punch cards. We had to leave the punch cards in a pigeon hole overnight and the following morning, we would get back our output on that old green-lined printer paper. Typos would have to be corrected and re-submitted (overnight again). One interesting thing was that, if you managed to program an infinite loop, the university mainframe would kill it after 2 seconds. Think how long 2 seconds of processing time is now!